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Thursday, October 31, 2013

Filmi Fridays: History of Computing in Bollywood

As Mickey hopes to go ‘viral’ today, it
might be a good idea to look at the times Bollywood has used computers to catch
thieves, impress women, get a job and kill villains. Bollywood has always been
more partial to hand-pumps than hard-drives but here is a small selection from
the history of computing in Bollywood.

The first time a computer was mentioned in
Bollywood was way back in 1978 – in Trishul.

When Shashi Kapoor returned from abroad,
he called Raakhee (his father’s super-efficient secretary) a ‘computer’ ek
aisi machine jo har sawaal ka theek jawaab deti hai! Clearly, this
‘computer is always right’ notion was before GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out) was
coined. Rakhee’s ability to remember cement quotas, her boss’ appointments,
design files – while remaining unflappable all the time – was the reason for
the nickname.

The computer made a reasonably
high-profile entry in a high-profile film, starring a Tam-Brahm engineer – Roja.

Arvind Swamy was the good boy (presumably
a computer engineer from IIT) who had a computer at home, which was quite a big
thing in 1992 when the movie released. He turned out to be a ‘cryptologist’ who
was hired to crack codes in Kashmir and he did so with a computer which had
wildly blinking signals on the screen. From his facial expressions, we didn’t know
if he cracked the code because he retired to sing songs in the snow with his
wife immediately afterwards.

Sooraj Barjatya’s films are full of heroines
who start off ambitiously on the academic path before settling down in happy
domesticity. In Maine Pyar Kiya,
heroine Suman (Bhagyashree) stood first in her Inter(mediate) exams by scoring
87% but instead of attending college, became a house-guest at her father’s
friend’s house.

In Hum
Aapke Hain Koun, heroine Nisha (Madhuri Dixit) had moved with the times and
was studying ‘Computers’ but no device was visible in her vicinity.

By the time, Sooraj Barjatya made his next
film – Hum Saath Saath Hain – Alok
Nath had graduated to tinkering with computers and staring at long sheets of
dot-matrix printer output.

Probably the first online banking
transaction in Bollywood happened in Ajnabee.

In typical Abbas-Mustan style, an
elaborate cat-and-mouse game played out between Akshay Kumar and Bobby Deol as
the former tried to make off with a fortune by framing the latter. The climax
happened in a cruise ship and Bobby finally pulled a fast one by transferring
back the $100 million Akshay had got as his dead wife’s insurance payout. How? Hacking
was still some years away in Bollywood but smart ol’ Bobby just guessed the
nineteen letter password. Everything was planned, you see.

Hacking came into age by the time Om Jai Jagdish was made in 2002 (the
year after Ajnabee).

In Anupam Kher’s directorial debut,
Abhishek Bachchan was the ‘ethical hacker’ who illegally entered his college’s
website to leak exam papers for his friends. After he was rusticated for his
troubles, he became a pizza delivery boy in Bangalore and tried for a job in
India’s leading software film – Softcell Technology. By finding out who hacked
the company’s website in 100 seconds, he got himself a deal to make anti-virus
software. And in true Bollywood style, he named the software Om.

A Wednesday
was full of gadgets we use in our daily lives that can be transformed into
deadly weapons of terror with a bit of information from online tutorials.
Terrorist (Naseeruddin Shah) used a combination of changing SIM cards and a
laptop to create a web of fear. When the regular efforts by the police cyber
cell failed, a cool dude – who turned out to be a college dropout – was brought
into trace the calls being made. In an interesting shift of power, the heroic
police force was left to do the brawny things (fighting, chasing,
interrogating) while the young hacker did the delicate tech tinkering.

When the personal computer revolution
reaches a peak, you need people to sell them. That was exactly what a shady
computer company called AYS Corporation was doing. They were doing the standard
computer industry practice of over-promising and under-delivering till Harpreet
Singh Bedi joined them and questioned them all.

After a lot of software, Rocket Singh: Salesman Of The Year was
about the computer hardware industry with its aggressive sales managers,
porn-addicted maintenance guys and exasperated customers. The whole activity of
closing a sale, assembling the order and delivering it was shown wonderfully
well.

Computer games came to the forefront when
geeky game designer – Shekhar Subramaniam – invented a super-villain called Ra.One. The game was created to please
his gaming addict son, who went by the online name Lucifer and who could beat
even the super-villain. But in a fantasy twist, the super-villain got livid at
losing and came out of the game into the real world. All hell broke loose. Till
a super-hero called G.One emerged out of the game as well.

Himesh Reshmaiyya starred in Radio as a RJ with Radio Mirchi, who
was probably Hindi cinema’s first socially active character. As RJ Vivaan Shah,
he chatted on Facebook while his less-enlightened colleagues were still
figuring it out (‘Yaar, yeh Phesbuk hota kya hai?’). His relationship status
was ‘complicated’. His listeners complained about boyfriends on porn sites. And
he was supposed to be super-cool.

A more complicated take on Facebook
happened in Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge,
which poked a lot of fun at the practice of cyber-stalking and
online-despogiri. What Bollywood sidekicks have been failing at since time
immemorial – wooing heroines – suddenly became very easy with assumed online
identities. A complicated love polygon ensued when people posed as each other
on Facebook (or something like it) and fell in love with online avatars and out
of love with offline ones!

A South Indian woman came to Kolkata to
find her missing husband and landed up at the Kalighat Police Station to file a
missing person report. The officers turned out to be grappling with the Kolkata
Police Database software they had to install on the police station’s computer. When
she saw them getting hassled by the beeping ‘System Error’ message, she
effortlessly moved in and helped them out. Her knowledge of the computers would
come handy later in the film when she had to extract some information
clandestinely. After all, she was a software engineer just like her husband.
Except her husband turned out nothing like what she had said.

And that was the Kahaani.

UPDATED TO ADD:

My friend Asha (also an acclaimed VO artist, who has worked in Dibakar Banerjee's Shanghai) has this to say: "All those fancy glowing and beeping buttons in Shaan and Mr India were computers too. Just that we did not know it then. And you deliberately missed the image of a CPU-hugging Emraan Hashmi running to safety in a riot-affected, curfew-declared wannabe-Shanghai?"

Hi Dipta, ‘Yaadein’ will perfectly fit into your Computing chronology. It was probably the first movie which captured the ‘dotcom’ boom and made it’s hero the CEO of a ‘happening’ dating/ marriage website!One query though - Between Trishul (mentioned only in dialogue) and Roja (plot-point), didn’t the Computer play any role in any movie in the 80s??